The Place, London
January 14, 2026
This evening again brought together three works. Through movement and shifting energies, the dances respond to social pressures, inherited relationships, and the constant demands of contemporary life, revealing how the body absorbs, resists, and transforms what it is asked to carry.
Fracture, performed by Megan Westpfel Co., opens with a striking image of uniformity. Six dancers stand together under the lights, dressed in formal suits that suggest order, discipline and social compliance. As the work progresses, layers of clothing are gradually shed, allowing individual personalities to emerge through differences in physical quality, rhythm and presence.
The choreography is highly energetic, generating momentum through collective phrases that turn into solos. Each dancer brings a distinct physical presence and vitality, with the choreography allowing individual qualities to remain visible rather than smoothing them into uniformity. The work is logically structured, each section building clearly on the last. Net-like head coverings, later torn away, operate as a clear yet effective symbol of confinement. Once removed, the work shifts toward the emergence of individual movement styles and self-awareness.
The work’s strength lies in its powerful transmission of energy: between dancers, across the group, and outward to the audience. Its coherence is reinforced by the dancers’ physical capability and energy, which carry the work forward and give its ideas full embodied force. It is a work with clear potential for further development, and one that rewards close attention.
Photo courtesy Ming Chin Hsieh
Born, Never Asked turns inward feelings. Presented as a solo by Taiwan-born artist Ming-Chin Hsieh (謝明瑾), it draws on projection, masks and translucent fabric, placing the performer in dialogue with memory and absence. Rooted in personal experience, the choreography explores the fragile bond between mother and daughter, allowing affection and pain to coexist without resolution.
Hsieh’s dance training (she attended National Taiwan University of the Arts, 國立台灣藝術大學, and the London Contemporary Dance School) enables a high level of body control, through which movement communicates with expression. Interaction with object partners (a mask, projected imagery and mesh) creates a series of shifting relationships, with each scene transitioning smoothly. The solo format keeps the focus inward, allowing memory and reflection to be carried through a single body.
Without prior access to the work’s introduction, the abstraction invites varied interpretations from the audience. While presented as a solo, the work has clear potential for further development, including the possibility of expanding its embodiment through additional performers. Given the specificity of the ideas and the use of multiple objects, a larger cast could create richer visual layers than a solo dance performance.
Attention Economy, performed by Wild Guess, adopts a markedly different approach, positioning itself as an interdisciplinary performance rather than a dance work. Created and performed by three artists, it’s a collaboration between poet and playwright Harry Walker, movement artist Margot Conde Arenas, and sound artist Robbie Hail. The piece combines live sound, spoken poetry, movement and analogue visual elements. Somatic movement practices underpin the physical material, while themes of digital anxiety, capitalist decay and the erosion of the self-circulate through text and sound.
Live music shaping atmosphere becomes central. Flashlights cut through the space, sometimes illuminating performers, sometimes directed toward written prompts or the audience. The work relies heavily on improvisation movement and energetic exchange, with bodies responding in real time to sonic and textual cues. Words written on paper, placed on the floor, and that bear recurring thematic statements, serve as both source material and anchor, framing the concerns that drive the performance.
Attention Economy operates primarily as a form of embodied practice. The piece depends on drawing on improvisation and conceptual expression as its primary centre. The choreography could benefit from more varied use of space. The work closes in a moment of shared rest, as the three performers sit together, leaning on one another.
Resolution offers artists space to test and develop their practices. Some works appear fully formed, while others feel provisional, still in dialogue with larger ideas yet to come. This is not a shortcoming but part of the platform’s function. Across the evening, energy emerges as a shared currency. It’s transmitted from body to body, from stage to audience, carrying the works’ concerns beyond refinement or resolution. What stays with those watching is more a feeling of work that is still energetic and ongoing development.
Resolution 26 continues at The Place to February 25, 2026.